


the knowing and the not knowing

by scintillio_coll



Series: Nancy who is not the same Nancy [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Companion Piece, F/M, Gen, meandering nonsense, moving on is weird, steve harrington is still not a bad guy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-01
Updated: 2016-12-01
Packaged: 2018-09-03 10:44:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8709358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scintillio_coll/pseuds/scintillio_coll
Summary: He grins all slow and confident, because they’re only on such sure footing when they’re together. Nancy took ballet as a girl, so she was never really part of a team, but she imagines it has to feel like this.





	

 

The change in the weather strikes her hard, a chafing, agitated adjustment. It feels like a betrayal, shrugging out of her layers as she walks the short distance home. It’s as if the winter has spanned the entirety of her conscious life. That any event, moment, interaction, from before the weather turned and Will went away, was wholly separate from this. This sharp reality. This rightside-up.

She looks down at her hands, clutching at textbooks and her worn denim jacket and suddenly they’re filthy, slick and streaked with that oily and viscous sludge. It looks like rust. Like old blood. Her stomach turns to acid and maybe the air goes a little gray but when she blinks, she finds her way back to the sunshine.

“ _Shit_ ,” she hisses to herself.   

She thinks about her white fingerless gloves. The ones she splurged on with some babysitting money that’d been piling up. They were staining beyond saving in that place, by that night. She hadn’t missed them.

Maybe the warmth is good.

  ___________

 

Jonathan had tried to tell her, that afternoon in the darkroom, that people don’t say what they mean. But their faces, the tilt in a neck, the tiny flicker, like a sieve opening, that passes when a thought tumbles forth, that’s what needs to be…well, heard? That’s the part of someone that _speaks._ Like the lights used to speak. 

Like four years ago, the first time Jim Hopper rolled by in his cruiser, windows down, cigarette dangling, and saw him and his mom loading groceries in the supermarket parking lot. His face had said _a lot_ of something.

It’s way easier for him to rely on that, then. To _click click_ away in the background with his camera, stand vigil as scenes bloom in the chemicals, and attempt to interpret those. Reading tea leaves. 

The holidays were a good excuse to take nothing but snaps of Will. At the table, out back, racing Dustin to the last Little Debbie. Smirks and grins and a sleepy nod that Nancy _Awws!_ at when he shows her the processed photo.  

There are plenty of others, of course. Pale, frowning, gnawing unconsciously on a fingernail. A stoney, wary stare towards the door. 

They hide these from his mom. Jonathan feels conflicted, he can’t keep it off his face and he’s taught her to be so good at reading those. She can’t tell what it is, though. Guilt or fear or the tiniest ray of resentment.

It doesn’t matter, to be realistic, and the new Nancy is nothing but. Even the pictures where Will is beaming all say the same thing, foretell the same fortune. The boy isn’t getting better.

Nancy hasn’t let Jonathan take her picture for weeks. She wonders how long until he realizes she's not getting better, either. 

_______

 

Saturday nights play out the same now. 

Maybe she used to catch a movie with Barb or, later, act out her part with Steve. 

Now she watches her mother cook casseroles. Her dad naps in the recliner while the boys make constant noise in the basement, in the background. She envies his cultivated ignorance, even if the newer version can’t relate to it.

The boys are over a lot, Mom insists, which is probably intended as a favor to Joyce as much as  the desire to keep her son _in_ the house. Will, especially, sleeps over more and more often. 

Joyce is glad for it, she can the hear the relief in her tone, like her shoulders are sagging a little. Karen always calls, but only on nights when Joyce is half out the door for a shift, pushing through a few extra desperate hours, pennies in the bottom of a can.

“Do you want to invite Jonathan?” her mom asks ambivalently, chopping an onion with the smooth back and forth of a knife. Part of her sees skin there, something without a face, Barb’s blood on Steve’s pool deck. She tears her gaze away before the visual makes her heave.  

“Jonathan’s not really a ‘family dinner’ kind of guy,” she mutters to her homework, but it sounds dangerously close to _He’s not him_.

“Oh?” her mom shrugs, a tad too aloof for it to be genuine, and Nancy knows that, for the millionth time, Karen is wondering why the hell her daughter and the Byers boy have matching scars. “Well…Not everyone is.”

Holly looks up from her coloring book across the table, glances at their mom, and then to Nancy. She broadcasts an awareness that’s new, it’s in the way her brow furrows a restrained question. Nancy wasn’t old or mature enough to recognize it in Mike. Everyone has aged lately. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Karen smiles at both her girls, “I don’t need him to eat meatloaf with me.” 

The knife taps against the cutting board with each downward stroke and if there are tears in Nancy’s eyes it’s probably just the onion.

  ___________

 

Jonathan is most obviously not Steve when they walk together. The trek to his car in the rear parking lot is quiet, their fingers just tangled at the tips. He doesn’t throw his arms around, doesn’t drag her to and fro. There’s a profound beauty in him just standing _next to her._

He grins all slow and confident, because they’re only on such sure footing when they’re together. Nancy took ballet as a girl, so she was never really part of a _team,_ but she imagines it has to feel like this. 

She keeps falling for him. Over and over. _Hard._

A stack of photos are on the passenger seat when she starts to climb in, she reaches to move them, almost oblivious, before Jonathan suddenly grabs them up.

“If those are more pictures of me through a window…” she teases, holding her hand out. 

Jonathan frowns, his face the same discordant mix that she’s starting to associate with him hiding something, then huffs, and relents. 

It’s about a dozen shots, really great ones, actually, the composition just right. The boys are huddled up in the distance, near the tree line of the Byers’ backyard. The shed in the foreground and a strip of blue sky above box the image in a satisfying way. 

But even over a great divide, their faces obscured and blurry, they are so readable. Mike’s fuzzy face downcast, his hand on Will’s shoulder. Lucas looks skyward, hands clapped over his head. Dustin is just a slouching back and a brown smudge of hair but there is anguish in every line of his form. 

It’s probably one of the best pictures Jonathan’s ever taken. 

She feels herself start to cry. That’s not so unusual, they’ve both done that, at this point, a _bunch_ of times together. But this is different. It has nothing to do with Barb like a millstone around her neck, or the fear that twists out of the brightest day, or anything that counts her at all. She touches a fingertip to Mike’s minuscule gloved hand on Will’s shoulder. 

“You can’t ever show anyone this,” her voice is steady, but her hands shake a little. “They wouldn’t want…this wasn’t for us, whatever this was.” A tear slips into the valley between her nose and lips, “Promise me.” 

When she glances up at Jonathan, his expression says something totally selfless. He doesn’t try to wipe away her tears, merely kisses her palm, her forehead, and takes the photos from her hand. 

“Yeah, Nancy. Promise.” 

  _________

 

Later, as Jonathan pumps gas and buys his mom a pack of smokes, Nancy slips one of the copies into her bag. 

He’ll know. 

_________

 

Something wakes her in the sharp, static quiet of the middle of the night. At first it is like the brushing of her hair against her shoulders or the itch before a cough. Her room is so dark it’s disorienting and as she hefts herself up, she sinks to her elbows in rotten mattress, everything slick and frigid and foul so she screams despite the vines that have squirmed past her chin.

It’s gone just as quickly as her waking, only a few more heartbeats passing before her door is pressed open with forced control, the sweet yellow light from the hall spilling in with stable normalcy. 

“Mom?” her voice is smaller than she is used to. She feels smaller, too. 

Karen just stands in the doorway, her weight passing from foot to foot, “I’m here, Nance.”

She doesn’t want to pry, she doesn’t want to push, she doesn’t want her daughter to shutter all her windows, turn out her own string of lights, and disappear into the woods. Karen understands all of it and none of it, has memorized the new marks on her kids, the new awareness in their faces, and doesn’t let herself ask even though the weight of desperate curiosity, of the _knowing_ and the _not knowing_ must literally crush her. 

Nancy recognizes the enormous strength in that act, halting at the cusp, allowing her child her own air to breathe. Something about the realization buoys, calms her.

“Mom,” the new Nancy could probably take a few deep breathes, flex her fingers in the worn warmth of her comforter, and send her away, “Can you stay with me a minute…until I…”

Her mother props herself up on a couple of spare pillows, the door still open and the hall light so friendly. She feels familiar fingers thread through her hair. Nothing wrong with taking comfort when it’s given.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she whispers too honestly.

  _________

 

She doesn’t even grab a jacket, the morning is chilly but it’ll burn off soon enough. Both facts fill her with a sort of anticipation, a welcome restlessness. 

The ghost of Barb still hangs in every corner and Nancy is making her peace with that. But what Nancy can’t tolerate, what the new thing in her chest that can _take it_ will not accept _,_ is just being scared, pretending there’s nothing to say. It won't fix Will, it won't honor Barb, and it won't change what can't be changed. 

There are so few of them, bodies that pushed through the webby darkness and emerged on the other side of the tightrope. Fewer still that came back. 

Will and Joyce deserve their peace. 

“You _know_ you shouldn’t be here,” Chief Hopper barely looks up from the case file he’s flipping through. The words are gruff but his tone is as lighthearted as he can manage. A curl of smoke twists up from the ashtray, most of the cigarette a perfect column of soot, burnt almost to the filter. 

She smiles at him politely, she is still partly that girl from before, the one who balked at authority (but unconsciously, she also cracks her knuckles), sits when he gestures to the chair.

He’s not interested in small talk, the question in his quirked lips says enough, and she might not be one for chit chat either these days. Besides, his face has been shadowed in _hiding something_ since she walked in. 

“Do you remember…what it looked like in there?”

The file snaps closed and she startles just a hair as it slaps onto his desk, “Well, that’s a stupid bullshit question.” 

"How about…do you ever see it now?”

And just like that- he almost deflates. He reaches for the cigarette but its burned itself out, so he drags his hands through his hair and shrugs, “Yeah, kid, I see it now.”

“You don’t seem worried,” she quips. 

He chuckles as he lights another cigarette, “Nancy, I piss myself every time.” 

She barks out a laugh and he shoots her a lopsided grin. 

“You, though…” his chin tilts up and he exhales a cloud, but doesn’t continue.

He crosses his arms and sits back, managing somehow to look even bigger. His eyebrows raise sharply, his eyes flicking over her face in an inquisitive way, searching for what she’s not quite saying. He seems satisfied with whatever he finds there.  

They’re a bit similar now. It’s easy to see how a man like this was born. Things keep going bad. People keep getting lost.

“You gonna stay ready, Nancy?” 

She glares and he seems to enjoy that, nods and clenches her hands. She’ll slice her own palm a thousand times if she has to.  

The same isn’t asked of him.

It doesn’t matter, to be realistic, and the new Nancy is nothing but. The Chief doesn’t skulk around town as quietly as he thinks. 

The photo is in a sealed envelope that she leaves on the edge of his desk. It’s a gesture, of course he’ll rip it open as soon as she leaves.

“I think she’d like to see that,” Nancy says gently.

_Hiding something_ is a curtain that falls. 

“Out.” 

She respects that he doesn't deny it.

  _________

 

That afternoon, a little sun drunk and kiss swollen, Nancy let’s Jonathan take her picture. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Healing is hard, dude, even for monster-hunters like Nancy and the boys. 
> 
> I think this is a little more fleshed out (certainly longer) than the first part but maaaaaaaybe still meandering nonsense? 
> 
> I really love Karen Wheeler.


End file.
